I’ve been patiently waiting for Mina the Hollower since the Kickstarter went up in 2022. I didn’t need to know much beyond “It’s Yacht Club’s New Game” and “They’re Doing a Faux-GBC game like Link’s Awakening DX”. I’m an easy mark. It was sad when it was delayed late last year, but Q4 2025 was plenty stacked, I could wait, and whoooo boy was it worth the wait.

They 100% delivered on the promise. It’s a Faux-GBC game like Link’s Awakening DX, and they took the same level of care implementing it as they previously did with Shovel Knight. They successfully managed to strike the balance between working within the constraints of a simulated classic console (100% pixel art, hard limits on palette colors, hard limits on attack input directions, etc), while also modernizing some core mechanics.

It certainly looks like Link’s Awakening, with beautiful sprite art, chunky character models, fixed screen transitions and so on. It also sorta plays like something between Link’s Awakening and a pre-SOTN Castlevania. You can only attack in cardinal directions, you can’t strafe, but you don’t get an inventory of items. Instead your sidearms are picked up in-world and at most you can have two of them with limited ammo.

The biggest departure, however, is that damage, healing, and player death is cribbed straight from Dark Souls & Friends. There are no heart pickups, you have a health meter, take damage and it goes down, deal damage (or pick up somewhat rare tulip drops) and you’ll add “yellow” health back to your meter, but that doesn’t actually heal you. Instead, you have to find a safe opportunity to stand motionless for a few seconds to pop a VERY limited healing vial, which will recover Yellow -> Red health. So you can’t just heal whenever you want to, you have to deal enough damage (or find enough tulips) to actually heal, and you can’t just do it in the middle of combat or you’ll probably just end up losing even more health and a vial charge. Additionally – stop me if you’ve heard this one before – when you die you leave a “spark” where you died and respawn at the most recent save point you passed. If you die again and failed to recover the spark you lose all of your unsecured / unspent currency.

The game’s core “gimmick” is your foundational movement tech of burrowing. Unlike Link, Mina can jump at will, and if you hold the button she’ll dive into the ground below her after jumping. While burrowing you move slightly faster than walking, and you get a boosted jump when you exit a burrow, so much of the platforming is based around diving into the right area, emerging at the right time, and then using the speed + jump boost to cross gaps. It’s also incredibly useful during combat as you can use it to cross-up enemies, dodge attacks, or just to scuttle out of the way to safety long enough to get a heal in. For such a simple mechanic it gives a ton of opportunity for skill expression via all the different ways to use it.

Structurally the game is pretty Zelda-ish. There’s a hub city surrounded by 6 zones, you’re strongly recommended to start by heading north-east, but you can seemingly tackle the zones in any order. Unlike a classical Zelda there’s not always a clear distinction between “The Region the Dungeon Is In” and “The Dungeon”, in Mina sometimes it’s explicit, sometimes you just sorta keep exploring into a zone and realize you’ve actually been in “The Dungeon” for the past 20 minutes. Sometimes you don’t realize you’re even heading to a dungeon, you just end up in one. The regions and dungeons are also incredibly varied and largely avoided stale tropes, with levels like “there’s a spooky autumn harvest town haunted by a monster that’s abducting children, go navigate through the farms that are crawling with crow-cultists while being chased by the monster”.

Tonally it’s about as far from a Zelda game as you can get. It’s basically Bloodborne but with furries. Mina is a skilled engineer who built power plants all across Tenebrous Isle and with her job complete she went home. The game starts with her being summoned back to the island because everything has gone sideways, there are monsters everywhere, the newly-industrialized town is under siege, and the power plants are on the brink of collapse. Yes, it is strange that we had two top-down Zelda-likes with large-eared animal protagonists dealing with a society in the middle of an energy crisis within 2 years of each-other, but Pipistrello is a very different game, far more focused on puzzles whereas Mina is more focused on combat and exploration.

Mina has turned out to be a somewhat divisive title. It’s hard, far harder than the games it looks like. More than just hard, it also has a lot of friction and most of that friction comes from sticking to intentional game design decisions. Core combat is a good example of this: you can only attack in cardinal directions. No exceptions. It feels antiquated, but it feels antiquated by-design. They could have made it so you could attack in any direction with snappy cooldowns instead of the chunky slow ones present in the game. But they didn’t. I personally got over this pretty quickly but I get it, it’s very restrictive, and there’s no technical reason they couldn’t have made it easier. You can either get mad about this or get used to it.

The map situation is also something that has led to quite a bit of Discourse: The map in the game is so restrictive that it might as well not exist. For starters, you straight up don’t get a map by default. First you have to get to the point that you can do unlockable permanent upgrades, and then you have to buy it. Once purchased, it still isn’t just straight up mapped to SELECT, you have to find one of your Underlabs and physically walk to where the map is and interact with it… and then it just shows you a picture of the world map. No room-by-room breakdown, no indicator of a tile you haven’t visited yet, no blinking markers for dungeons or upgrades, just a vague sense of where you are on the whole world map.

But wait! There’s an upgraded map you can buy later on! Surely that will make it useful! No. It adds collectable counts per zone. That’s it. Still as useless as it was previously.

This is frustrating, it makes exploration hard, it makes cross-room pathing / routing challenging, it makes puzzles that span multiple rooms harder than they would be otherwise… but I’m reasonably certain that’s the point. Many puzzles throughout the game are based on hidden / obscured information, like one little tile on the edge of the screen that indicates you can wriggle through the wall there. There aren’t any giant cracks in walls, it’s way more subtle, like along a border wall there will be a little break in the hard barrier that’s a barrier type you know you can burrow under. Pop over and you’ll get a little one-room puzzle to get a hefty chunk of bone crystal, or some equally small little upgrade. Other times the puzzles will be “position” based, where you might see a chest up on an inaccessible ledge, and the puzzle is figuring out how to get to the other side of that tile so you can easily drop down on it.

For these types of puzzles if you could just mash your controller’s equivalent of a SELECT button and immediately see “oh duh there’s a tile over here I haven’t uncovered” or “oh sure the other side of that tile is up in the town I need to go there to drop down to get this chest”, these puzzles would all be absolutely trivial. Having to engage your meat-brain gives the puzzles value beyond the actual in-game reward. To me, this level of mandatory brain engagement was delightful. Half the time I didn’t even care what the reward was, it didn’t matter if it was just some bone crystal, because I was rewarded simply by finding it in the first place. If I could have just pulled up a map, felt dumb that I missed the one tile preventing my progress, and then all I got out of it was some currency I didn’t particularly need, I think it would have felt worse. But all that said, I understand why people don’t like this. It works great for my particular special brain, I can’t be sure it would be the same for everyone.

Another thing that has come up as a pain-point in discussions with folks is that yes, there are boss run-backs. That’s sort of unavoidable with the souls-like subgenre. I felt this was fine, there was nothing as frustrating as the run-back to The Last Judge in Silksong, and no bosses as technically demanding as Skarrsinger Karmelita, but that’s where my benchmark is. Yours will likely be different, and accordingly your mileage may vary.

I think the fundamental challenge here is that the primary game Shovel Knight was lifting from was NES-era Mega Man, and Mega Man was hard. Insta-kill spikes everywhere, insta-kill pits, tons of knockback on all attacks, bosses with complicated movement and attack patterns, etc. So when Shovel Knight was hard, oh no problem, you should sorta know what you’re getting into, it’s fine. But Mina looks like Link’s Awakening, and that game is super chill whereas Mina is very un-chill. It’s not the most unforgiving and punishing Souls-like game, but it’s nowhere near Link’s Awakening. If you come in expecting a breezy Link’s Awakening adventure game you’re going to have a bad time, and for some people that incongruity will be a dealbreaker, for me it was a fun challenge and I enjoyed it.

I recommend Mina, Highly Recommend if you know what you’re getting into, also Highly Recommend if you can nab it on sale, though the MSRP of $20 is a steal as-is.